ESUG 2016 Registration

Read more.

Aqueducts

Nice quote on Twitter:

"Every time I look at Smalltalk, I feel I know how Dark Age engineers must have felt looking at the Roman Aqueducts."

FullBlockClosureInstaller

In Pharo installing Kernel classes is far from trivial (the SlotClassBuilder raise error and one cannot modify the Kernel classes using the IDE).

This package from Clement allows to install the correct classes for the FullBlockClosure, and update everything so all the state is correct. Nice.

Smalltalk VM History

Did you notice that the commits from Eliot Miranda to the Squeak/Pharo/Cuis/Newspeak VMMaker packages follow a year pattern (1850, 1851, ...) and include not only a description of the changes but also what happened in the year corresponding to the commit number.

Wonder what happens when he reaches 2016 and following commits...

Genetic Algorithm for Pharo

A genetic algorithm implementation is available from the Pharo Catalog provided by Alexandre Bergel.

I helped Alexandre in providing the config for this. I like the package. His genetic algorithm code is nice and interesting - it allows to play with Genetic algorithms in the regular Smalltalk tools (workspace, inspectors, ...) and the package also provides Roassal visualizations for them. 

You definitely should check this package out. Code is on STHub.

Arff Generator in Pharo

Weka is a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks. Weka defines a format called "Arff" to be used for data importation. On GitHub you will now find an Arff generator written in Pharo.

Changing Pharo background picture

Want to style your Pharo image with a wallpaper image? Peter describes the possible options in detail.

JSON persistency with SQLite database in Pharo

as described by Pierce on his blog. Really nice!

Scratch performance

Tim optimized Scratch for the Raspberry Pi ... now it runs much faster. Read more.

Minimal tODE API

The GemStone/S GCI code was ported to UFFI and now allows to have a minimal tODE API for accessing the object database from Pharo 5.0. Read more.

Mocketry 3.0

New version of Mocketry 3.0 for Pharo is available. Read more.

PolyMath-Extensions

Newton's method for vector problems (experimental) is in ‪#‎PolyMath‬ Extensions. Read more

Pillar 3.0.0 release

is available. Read more.

Alternate Reality Kit by Randall Smith at Xerox PARC 1986

Algernon-Launcher for Squeak

Back from the days when I used Squeak there was a nice tool called "Algernon" which was a simple "type in search" tool. I used it very often.

Later in Pharo days such a tool was missing - but after a while the "Spotter" tool for Pharo was provided by the GT team based on the same idea.

The nice thing is that now also the Algernon code was updated for latest Squeak in a project called "Algernon-Launcher".

BTW: Spotter does not allow to evaluate the given text as expressions, but the tool is extendable and maybe should provide this Algernon feature by default as well.

IWST 2016 - International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies

CALL FOR PAPERS is here.

VM Learning: Call Stack Management

Want to learn about virtual machine construction. Then check out this one.

Generate Spec CRUD applications

Code is on STHub and a video is here:

Open WebBrowser from Pharo

A simple package for unform and platform independent WebBrowser access for Pharo:

• for Pharo 4.0 onwards based on NativeBoost
• for Pharo 5.0 onwards based on UFFI

Read more here.

PARROT AR Drone 2.0 with Pharo

Repo with code is here. Read more here.

Joystick test in Pharo

Joystick test (part of OSWindow project in Pharo)

Video on how to report a Pharo bug and contribute by fixing it

Short video on how to report a bug in Pharo and fix it.

Pharo Pomodoro (updated) - version 1.6

Updated the code of Pomodoro timer for Pharo 5 once again:

• settings with custom start value and custom colors
• better resizing behavior of the morph
• pause/continue - start/restart possibility
• default colors aligned with Pharo scheme
• pause state in Pomodoro instead of Morph
• separate core and tests in own packages

demonstrated in a new video:

New version of Mocketry 3.0

is available. Read more here.

MessageFlowBrowser updated for Pharo 5

I updated my MessageFlowBrowser for Pharo 5 and added a new video:

TDOOOP Slides from ETAPS 2016

Interesting Slides from Oscar Nierstrasz from an invited talk at European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2016) with the provocative title "The Death of Object-Oriented Programming" (TDOOOP)

 As meanwhile any technology claims to be object orientied (or object based) I would rather say

"OOP is dead long live REAL OOP (with Smalltalk and Pharo)"

Pharo Days 2016 Session 2 GT Moldable Tools

Pharo Days 2016 Session 1

Linear Algebra Package for Smalltalk built upon LAPACK

called Smallapack. Check out out here.

Pharo and CentOS

I created another video on my CentOS support for Pharo

Man page support in OSUnix

I now provide Unix man page support in OSUnix for Pharo,
here an example in Ubuntu:

Moose-FAMIX-SAP-Extractor

docu is here.

Support for CDB in Pharo

CDB, which is short for "constant database" is a database where the DB contains an entire data set (e.g. a single associative array) in a single computer file. Four students from a lecture released the Pharo implementation for CDB support as Stef wrote. The repo can be found on STHub.

Simple FogBugz Search tool in Pharo

Played with the JSON API of Pharo FogBugz issue tracker with the outcome of another little Pharo tool that lets you:

• login to FogBugz from Pharo
• enter a string and search for according issues
• open a browser on a selected issue in the result list (works on Linux and Win so far) 

The project repo is at: http://www.smalltalkhub.com/#!/~TorstenBergmann/FogBugz

One can use the client also directly:

|client| client := FogBugzClient loginUser: 'abc at def.com' password: 'secret'. (client query: 'UFFI') inspect. client logout

You can download the tool in latest Pharo 5 (50660 or later) from catalog or by opening the Spotter and entering "FogBugz", wait and hitting ENTER.

Surprise

After a renaming discussion on the pharo-dev list I suggested to rename "SciSmalltalk" into "PolyMath" and it looks like this proposal got accepted.

At least now there is a new repo on STHub: http://www.smalltalkhub.com/#!/~PolyMath/PolyMath/

Nice!

Support for Linux operating system system (Ubuntu) in Pharo

Hubcap - SmalltalkHub browser video

Pomodoro timer video

Moose-FAMIX SAP-Extractor

A project to extract model data from a SAP system into the analysis platform Moose on Pharo Smalltalk (by using FAMIX). Read more.

Easy deploy of Pharo applications on the Web (Linux)

You can setup a full Seaside application behind Apache webserver. Or you could setup more lightweight behind NGINX.

Here is a short help on how to do that on Linux.

Tiny, yet so beautiful

The smallest piece of great Pharo code described in another article from Sven.

PDF4Smalltalk 1.4 is released

New with support for bitmapped images. Any Smalltalk image can be added to a PDF and many images can be extracted from existing PDFs.

Video on building a new widget for Spec

 

Visualizing dependencies between FAMIX packages

Using Pharo - see this video.

SqueakJS on ElectronJS (repackaging as desktop app again)

Web applications everywhere, but there are still desktop applications with full access to the underlying computer on the other side.

But meanwhile one can also create desktop applications using HTML, JS and Node.js, package them into an executable file and distribute it to all platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux, ...). There is a framework called Electron that allows to package an HTML/JS based application as a desktop application.

The portable Squeak Smalltalk which is usually running as a desktop application by using a native and fast Cog VM provides also a reimplementation of the Squeak VM in JavaScript. This project is from Bert and is called "SqueakJS". It allows to run Squeak Smalltalk on top of JavaScript within an HTML page. Because of the portability it runs 1:1.

And guess what: one can also use Electron to package SqueakJS then as a traditional desktop application again...

A nice twitter post from Fabio Niephaus who exactly did that can be found here: SqueakSmalltalk running on Cog VM vs. on SqueakJS on electronjs

Havent checked how fast this is ... but the lines between desktop and web based Smalltalk deployment become blurred once again.

Free Access to Ephemeric Cloud

There is free access to Ephemeric Cloud to all Pharo association members. Try it out!

Alan Kay talk at Coors Television (VPRI 0035)

Pharo Days Preregistration

is here.

GitHubcello

Paste your repo URI into GTSpotter. See *https://github.com/Uko/GitHubcello#githubcello-*

Plimbole

Plimbole is a sequencer for Generative Music that you can treat it either as a standalone program or you can get the Dolphin Smalltalk source and hack away to add new features of your own.

GSOC ideas for 2016 are available

Here is the list

Toying with Object Kernels

I like articles like that from Clément Béra, it shows the power that we have within Smalltalk systems.

The Pharo Unicode Project

Sven and Henrik cared about better Unicode support for Pharo. Read the announcement and have a look at a new article describing the details.

Gtoolkit 3.10 in Pharo 5.0

You can read about some new features of GT in Pharo 5 here.

Pharo MOOC Trailer

Pharo survey - issue tracking systems

Are you a ‪Pharo‬ developer? Did you complete the survey on issue tracking systems?

Squeak Oversight Board for 2016

The new Squeak Oversight Board for 2016 is elected.

Drawing the Parabolic Trajectory of an Object under Gravity

with Pharo and Dr. Geo

Amber Smalltalk 0.15.1

Release 0.15.1 is out. Breaks IE8 compatibility, wraps Promise directly, has a few changes under hood & will be strictly semver from now on.

A little Bloc demo

Another demo of Bloc (the replacement for Morphic): a hit test.

BioSmalltalk

BioSmalltalk: Bioinformatics in a pure objects environment. Based ob Pharo.

Aida 6.6 runs on newest Squeak 5

Red more here.

Large file uploads in Seaside

Nice article on how to use Seaside and Nginx to handle large file uploads

Pharo MOOC available

The registration for Pharo Massive Open Online Course (Pharo MOOC) is available

IPFS

SmallIPFS - Smalltalk Interplanetare Filesystem API. Read more and have a look at the project page

Numerical Methods Book (January 2016 snapshot)

The Numerical Methods Book was updated - have a look at the January 2016 snapshot

Seaside / .Net Job

If you like to apply read here.

Is Ruby really close to Smalltalk

And you learn that everything is an object in Smalltalk but not in Ruby.

Bounties for Pharo

A Bountysource Team for Pharo was setup by Marcus. This means that everyone can suggest bounties or contribute money to existing bounties.

GitHub API Bindings for Pharo

This project provides bindings to the GitHub API for Pharo. Nice !!!

Pharo Sprint 29 Jan

Read more.

Hidden Gems Screencast Series

Hidden Gems Screencast by Arden Thomas demoing useful Smalltalk use.

Specific domain visualizations

in Pharo. Read more.

Kendrick 0.29

Kendrick the platform for epidemiological modeling and analysis is out in version 0.29 beta

Pharo bootstrap

Currently in Pharo the image is maintained step by step by adjusting and changing it. It is like a database of objects that you maintain over time.

But since the beginning of Pharo there was this also the dream to be able to bootstrap the image cleanly right from the ground up. It is a lot of work to prepare such a bootstrapping process - but now the efforts bring the first fruits: there is a minimal Pharo kernel that is bootstrapped.

I can only say: amazing work!

Spotting senders and references

Spotting senders and references using Spotter in Pharo is explained here. You can also use the MessageFlowBrowser.

Smooth scrolling with Smalltalk 78

"At one point (Steve) Jobs, watching some text scroll up the screen line by line in its normal fashion, remarked, 'It would be nice if it moved smoothly, pixel by pixel, like paper.' With (Dan) Ingalls at the keyboard, that was like asking a New Orleans jazz band to play 'Limehouse Blues.' He clicked the mouse on a window displaying several lines of Smalltalk code, made a minor edit, and returned to the text. Presto! The scrolling was now continuous." -- Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael A. Hiltzik

OSSubprocess first milestone

So far there was an OSProcess project for executing OS commands from Pharo. Mariano is working on a new project called "OSSubprocess" that works with the new unified FFI.

He reached a first milestone now - you can read about the details here.

The Pharo Consortium is the sponsor of this development.

Snowglobe for SqueakJS

Snowglobe is a SqueakJS remote display surface written by Craig Latta for Squeak Smalltalk. So Squeak is running in a browser (Chrome here), acting as the display for a native Squeak app running somewhere else on the internet.

A first demo can be seen in this video:

PharoLauncher with Spur and Non-Spur

Up to image build #50496 (where 50000 range means Pharo 5.0) the Pharo images were non-spur. In December the image was migrated to Spur to get more speed and profit from the new virtual machine architecture. So for any newer Pharo 5.0 image you need the new Pharo Spur VM.

PharoLauncher is now able to find out if an image reguires the new Spur VM or the old one. You can set the location of old non-spur VM and new spur VM in the PharoLauncher settings.

This way you can work with old images Pharo 3, Pharo 4, Pharo 5 up to build 50496 as well as with the newer ones.

Read this post for more details or grab PharoLauncher from CI server.

WorkLog

There is a project from Esteban called WorkLog. It is written in Seaside.

If you would like to see it in action just visit: http://log.smallworks.eu/web/post/ and receive some infos how busy he is preparing Pharo for the future.

Pharo Spur 32 VM on Debian Stable

Want to run Spur virtual machine for Pharo on Debian. Then check out this one.

There is a CI build available.

Turing Machine simulator in Pharo

A Turing Machine simulator written in Pharo by Julien Delplanque.

• Article on Medium.com
• Code on GitHub

Tracing the Dynabook

A PhD Dissertation from 2006 about Dynabook and Smalltalk. Interesting nonetheless.

Shortcut learnability in Pharo

A small tool was introduced in recent Pharo 5 images. It is called Shortcut Reminder and reminds you n times about shortcuts that one can use as an alternative to clicking around.

One can enable the tool via Settings. Anytime you use a menu item that has a keyboard shortcut the shortcut is displayed on the screen in large letters. This happens n-times. Depending on your learning curve you can set the number of repetitions in the settings.

Pharo Mooc in preparation

The Pharo community is currently preparing a Pharo Mooc. It's not yet finished and therefore not yet officially announced - but some informations are already available and a lot is going on behind the scenes for it.

There is a GitHub Repo and a Roadmap for it if you already want to dig into the stuff.

The abbreviation Mooc means Massive Open Online Course. It will include tutorials and videos to learn about Smalltalk and Pharo in particular (70 lectures and videos).

The Mooc videos are currently in preparation. It is filmed with a professional setup as:

 - Picture 1
 - Picture 2
 - Picture 3
 - Picture 4

prove.

Science Smalltalk v0.39

The last stable version is Science Smalltalk: v0.39 (Pharo 4.0 and Pharo 5.0 with SpurVM) is out.

SqueakJS and Keyboard input on touch devices

There is work in progress to enable keyboard input on touch devices for SqueakJS. Nice!

Codemash presentation on Smalltalk

Larry Staton Jr gave a presentation on Smalltalk at CodeMash this week. Slides are here.

PharoJS in Toronto

Toronto Smalltalk User group meeting on Monday, Jan. 11 will be on PharoJS, with both NodeJS and browser examples. An interesting topic. Anyone able to record this and publish it as a video?

The next Pharo Sprints

Dates for 2016 in Lille are here. You are free to organize own sprints as well.

German article about Moose

Read it here.

Lessons learned - Custom ERP in Smalltalk

Interesting insights into a Seaside project.

ReadWriteLock for Pharo

is here. Read more.

OS Process Survey in Pharo

A Survey about Forking Operating System Processes in Pharo

Squeak/Smalltalk on Travis-CI

Squeak is now officially supported on Travis-CI. Read more.

Iliad 0.9.4 is out

The Iliad web framework was updated for Pharo 4.

Object Explorer for GemStone/S 64

A project still under development but already worth reading about: a (visual) Object Explorer for GemStone/S 64

Amber 0.14.18

A new release 0.14.18 of Amber is available.

NBSQLite3 on Dolphin Smalltalk 7

The SQLite wrapper is now also available for Dolphin 7.